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    Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground
    Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground
    Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground
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    Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground

    By Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Leonard Schmieding and ATG26

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    During the twentieth century, Germans experienced a long series of major and often violent disruptions in their everyday lives. Such chronic instability and precipitous change made it difficult for them to make sense of their lives as coherent stories—and for scholars to reconstruct them in retrospect. Ruptures in the Everyday brings together an international team of twenty-six researchers from across German studies to craft such a narrative. This collectively authored work of integrative scholarship investigates Alltag through the lens of fragmentary anecdotes from everyday life in modern Germany. Across ten intellectually adventurous chapters, this book explores the self, society, families, objects, institutions, policies, violence, and authority in modern Germany neither from a top-down nor bottom-up perspective, but focused squarely on everyday dynamics at work “on the ground.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerghahn Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2017
    ISBN9781785335334
    Ruptures in the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground
    Author

    Andrew Stuart Bergerson

    Andrew Stuart Bergerson is Professor of History and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is the author of Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: the Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (2004); and The Happy Burden of History: From Sovereign Impunity to Historical Responsibility (2011) with K. Scott Baker, Clancy Martin, and Steve Ostovich. He is currently one of the project leaders for Trug und Schein: Ein Briefwechsel (www.trugundschein.org), an intermedial project in the public humanities.

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      Book preview

      Ruptures in the Everyday - Andrew Stuart Bergerson

      RUPTURES IN THE EVERYDAY

      SPEKTRUM: Publications of the German Studies Association

      Series editor: David S. Luebke, University of Oregon

      Published under the auspices of the German Studies Association, Spektrum offers current perspectives on culture, society, and political life in the German-speaking lands of central Europe—Austria, Switzerland, and the Federal Republic—from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Its titles and themes reflect the composition of the GSA and the work of its members within and across the disciplines to which they belong—literary criticism, history, cultural studies, political science, and anthropology.

      Volume 1

      The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered

      Edited by Jason Philip Coy, Benjamin Marschke, and David Warren Sabean

      Volume 2

      Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects

      Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s

      Edited by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire

      Volume 3

      Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany

      Edited by David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Ryan, and David Warren Sabean

      Volume 4

      Walls, Borders, Boundaries

      Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe

      Edited by Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward

      Volume 5

      After The History of Sexuality

      German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault

      Edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog

      Volume 6

      Becoming East German

      Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler

      Edited by Mary Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port

      Volume 7

      Beyond Alterity

      German Encounters with Modern East Asia

      Edited by Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock

      Volume 8

      Mixed Matches

      Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment

      Edited by David M. Luebke and Mary Lindemann

      Volume 9

      Kinship, Community, and Self

      Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean

      Edited by Jason Coy, Benjamin Marschke, Jared Poley, and Claudia Verhoeven

      Volume 10

      The Emperor’s Old Clothes

      Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire

      Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

      Translated by Thomas Dunlap

      Volume 11

      The Devil’s Riches

      A Modern History of Greed

      Jared Poley

      Volume 12

      The Total Work of Art

      Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations

      Edited by David Imhoof, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, and Anthony J. Steinhoff

      Volume 13

      Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000

      Edited by Jason Coy, Jared Poley, and Alexander Schunka

      Volume 14

      Reluctant Skeptic

      Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture

      Harry T. Craver

      Volume 15

      Ruptures in the Everyday

      Views of Modern Germany from the Ground

      Andrew Bergerson, Leonard Schmieding, et al.

      Ruptures in the Everyday

      Views of Modern Germany from the Ground

      Edited by

      Andrew Stuart Bergerson & Leonard Schmieding

      Published in 2017 by

      Berghahn Books

      www.berghahnbooks.com

      © 2017 Andrew Bergerson and Leonard Schmieding

      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Bergerson, Andrew Stuart, editor. | Schmieding, Leonard, 1978-, editor.

      Title: Ruptures in the everyday: views of modern Germany from the ground / Andrew Bergerson (lead co-editor), Leonard Schmieding (lead co-editor).

      Description: New York: Berghahn Books, [2017] | Series: Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association ; 15 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017000398 (print) | LCCN 2017001439 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785335327 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785335334 (eBook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Germany--Social conditions--1990- | Germany--History— Social aspects--20th century, | Germany--History--Social aspects--21st century. | Social change--Germany--Psychological aspects. | Adjustment (Psychology)--Germany. | Identity (Psychology)--Germany. | Life change events--Germany--Psychological aspects--Case studies. | Microsociology--Case studies. | Germans--Attitudes. | National characteristics, German.

      Classification: LCC DD290.26 .R87 2017 (print) | LCC DD290.26 (ebook) | DDC 943.087--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000398

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN 978-1-78533-532-7 hardback

      ISBN 978-1-78533-533-4 ebook

      CONTENTS

      List of Illustrations

      List of Maps

      Acknowledgements

      List of Abbreviations

      1. Wende

      Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Mark E. Blum, Thomas Gurr, Alexandra Oeser, Steve Ostovich, Leonard Schmieding, and Sara Ann Sewell

      2. Self

      Leonard Schmieding and Paul Steege

      3. Interpersonal Relationships

      Mark E. Blum, Eva Giloi, and Steve Ostovich

      4. Families

      Phil Leask, Sara Ann Sewell, and Heléna Tóth

      5. Objects

      Jonathan Bach, Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, and Dani Kranz

      6. Institutions

      Elissa Mailänder, Alexandra Oeser, Will Rall, and Julia Timpe

      7. Anti-Semitism

      Susanne Beer, Johannes Schwartz, and Maximilian Strnad

      8. Violent Worlds

      Michaela Christ, Mary Fulbrook, and Wendy Lower

      9. Taking Place

      Jason Johnson, Craig Koslofsky, and Josie McLellan

      10. Telling Stories

      Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Mark E. Blum, Thomas Gurr, Alexandra Oeser, Steve Ostovich, Leonard Schmieding, and Sara Ann Sewell

      References

      Authors

      Index

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      Illustration 1.1. Collapsing House, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2010.

      Illustration 2.1. Ernst Jünger, frontispiece to In Stahlgewittern, 1920.

      Illustration 2.2. TJ Big Blaster Electric Boogie Performing during the Rap Contest, Dresden, ca. 1989. Private Archive Nico Raschick—Here We Come.

      Illustration 2.3. B-Boys Posing in the Imaginary Bronx, Dessau, ca. 1987. Private Archive Nico Raschick—Here We Come.

      Illustration 2.4. The Performance License of Alexander Morawitz from 1989. Front and back. Private Archive of Alexander Morawitz.

      Illustration 3.1. Max Scheler in Driving Costume, with Maria Scheler and Dr Rolf Hoffmann.

      Illustration 4.1. Collecting Donations for Red Aid, Leipzig, 1925.

      Illustration 4.2. Children in the Young-Spartakus-League Playing Reds versus Whites.

      Illustration 4.3. Red Women and Girls’ League Demonstration, Worms, July 1930.

      Illustration 5.1. Peter Ghyczy, Egg Garden Chair, 1968. White Polyurethane casing and blue upholstery.

      Illustration 5.2. Display of GDR-EraTelephones, GDR-Geschichtsmuseum, Perleberg, 2010.

      Illustration 5.3. Display of GDR-Era Kitchen, GDR-Geschichtsmuseum, Perleberg, 2010.

      Illustration 5.4. Display of GDR-Era Radios, GDR-Geschichtsmuseum, Perleberg, 2010.

      Illustration 5.5. Peter Holzhauer, Art Rack in the Wende Museum’s Vault, 2013. Digital photograph, courtesy of photographer Peter Holzhauer. Top, Heinz Drache (1929–1989), Das Volk sagt ‘Ja’ zum friedlichen Aufbau (The People Say Yes to Peaceful Construction), 1952; Bottom Left, Lothar Gericke’s Stadtlandschaft mit Liebespaar (Cityscape with Lovers), 1978; and Bottom Right, a Painting by Lutz Voigtmann (1941–1997), Düstere Stadt (Dismal City), 1978.

      Illustration 5.6. Brigade Karnatz Scrapbook, 1969. Title Page, Kampf um den Staatstitel, Kollektiv der sozialistischen Arbeit.

      Illustration 7.1. Erich Bloch, Bloch/Begall, 1946. Reprint from Kläre-Bloch-Schule 1992: 9.

      Illustration 7.2. The Guggenheimer Family, Unknown Location, Mid-1920s. Alfred Sitting in Front, Annemarie to His Right, Their Daughter Ursula Standing behind.

      Illustration 7.3. Hertha Ließ, Profil, Ravensbrück, 1941. Photo attached to her application forms for the SS-Rasse- und Siedlungs-Hauptamt (RuSHA) in order to marry SS-Unterscharführer Hans-Joachim Ehlert.

      Illustration 9.1. Treatment of the Whites. Illustration in Groeben, Guineische Reise-Beschreibung, 1694.

      Illustration 9.2. King Peter of Rio Sesder. Illustration in Groeben, Guineische Reise-Beschreibung, 1694.

      Illustration 9.3. Surveillance Photographs, Area around the Youth Club at Veteranenstrasse, Meeting Place of the Sonntagsclub, Berlin-Mitte, 1986.

      Illustration 9.4. Lesbians in the Church at the Friedenswerkstatt, Berlin Erlösergemeinde, n.d. (1980s).

      Illustration 10.1. Abandoned Apartment Building, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2010.

      MAPS

      Map 1.1. Germany Post-1945

      Map 1.2. Modern Berlin

      Map 1.3. Germany in Europe 1648–1945

      Map 1.4. European Trade Sites in Seventeenth-Century West Africa

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      This project has gestated for six years, and many people helped us realize it. We would like to thank the German Studies Association for promoting integrative scholarship; the Historicum at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich for hosting us in May of 2013; the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for funding that international interdisciplinary workshop and subsidizing this book; David Lübke and Berghahn Books for publishing this unconventional project; and our families for their enduring support and understanding.

      Our project benefitted from the constructive criticism of Monika Black, Douglas Catterall, Alon Confino, Joachim Häberlen, Marion Kaplan, Alf Lüdtke, Larson Powell, Rolf Rieß, Eli Rubin, Edith Sheffer, Jeremy Straughn, and Dennis Sweeney; the Research Network Welt Aneignen: Alltagsgeschichte in transnationaler Perspektive funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; as well as anonymous outside reviewers. Above all, the project leaders would like to thank the other twenty-four members of our team for their hard work, commitment, patience, endurance, and good will. This project demanded much more of these qualities than any of us imagined it would. We are so very appreciative of your professionalism and dedication. It has been a real pleasure to work collaboratively with such a talented group of scholars.

      Drew Bergerson and Leo Schmieding

      Kansas City, MO and Washington, D.C.

      August 2015

      ABBREVIATIONS

      CHAPTER 1

      Wende

      After that it all began with the Wende … and after that … the downsizing; we were the first, see? That we were no longer necessary. Sure we had our profession, but we could no longer practice it: we were no longer useful, see?

      —Dieter, Interview, 2010

      In 2010, a fifty-eight-year-old man named Dieter talked to one of the authors of this book about losing his job at a shipyard in the early 1990s. It left him without a steady job for more than a decade. The epigraph to this chapter is part of his semiautobiographical narrative: Dieter’s attempt, in cooperation with an interviewer, to make sense of his life by telling stories from and about it. It is interesting that Dieter accounted for being fired neither in terms of his job performance nor in terms of a structural crisis in the economy. He framed his personal crisis in terms of a major historical event for German-speaking Central Europe called the Wende.

      Dieter was born in 1952, so for him, Germany had simply meant the German Democratic Republic (GDR). During the Cold War from 1947 to 1989, Germany was divided into a smaller Communist East and a larger Capitalist West—the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). These two Germanies, along with a neutral Second Austrian Republic, were ground zero for the Cold War in Europe. The GDR was integrated into the East, led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact. The FRG was integrated into the West, led by the United States, through the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the European Economic Community (EEC). The stakes in Germany were high for the two superpowers, but they were even higher for the Germans themselves, who were recovering from the mass destruction and total defeat of World War II.

      Germans helped create this Cold War, including the Berlin Wall that divided East from West Germany from 1961 to 1989. They also challenged it at regular intervals, and they helped ultimately to undermine it (Port 2007; Steege 2007; M.W. Johnson 2008; Major 2009; Klimke 2010; Lemke 2011). In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary from 1985 until 1991 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had signaled his willingness for reform of the communist systems in satellite countries by introducing policies of openness, transparency, and restructuring—called glasnost and perestroika—in the USSR. When the stubborn, gerontocratic politburo of the GDR opposed the Soviet reform models, it isolated the satellite state from its big brother and found itself in a position of weakness by fall 1989.

      In Leipzig during a regular series of demonstrations on Mondays, the demands for domestic reform grew to include the opening of the Wall to inter-German traffic. Protests quickly spread across the GDR, further undermining both the legitimacy and the confidence of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The leaders of the GDR conceded to opening the Wall and to general, democratic elections. Days later, and somewhat in contradiction to these earlier goals, voices of both East and West Germans began demanding the reunification of these two Germanies. With the support of the Western Allies, FRG chancellor Helmut Kohl moved quickly to admit the Länder, or federal states, of the East into a so-called reunited Germany (Maier 1997; Pfaff 2006; Richter 2007; Fischer 2014).

      Germans on both sides of the Wall were bewildered by the rapid pace of these massive transformations in the economics and geopolitics of East Central Europe (Maier 1997; Herspring 1998; Pfaff 2006). These remarkable events sent shock waves into the village in the GDR where Dieter lived. Looking east, he observed the collapse of the Warsaw Pact along with the Communist regimes throughout East Central Europe and the Soviet Union. Looking west, Dieter watched as his community was absorbed into—some would say annexed by—the larger and richer West Germany. By default, Dieter fell under the protection of NATO and became a citizen of the EEC, soon to be renamed the European Union (EU). Through these national, regional, and global institutions, a Western-style social market economy penetrated into the East, destroying many of the formerly state-owned industries that were no longer competitive.

      A Wende means a turn or, better, a pivot. The Wende refers collectively to this series of rapid-fire events that took place between 1989 and 1991 during which Dieter’s country, the GDR, collapsed and was absorbed into the FRG. In framing his long-term unemployment in terms of the Wende, Dieter employed his historical imagination. He depicted his personal biography as part of a linear, temporal sequence of events driven by causes and consequences. Many people believe that the Wende marked a turning point in history: a brief moment in time when a relatively solid and fixed set of structures suddenly became fluid—and changed.

      Dieter’s way of telling his life story also involved a sociological imagination (Mills 1959). He implicitly associated this turning point in his life with a turning point in the lives of a larger imagined community (Anderson 1983) of people called Germans. Both ways of interpreting his experience arose out of the general everyday life scheme of expectations (Schütze 1975: 1005; Berger and Luckmann 1996); and yet Dieter had an agenda. In light of the Wende’s detrimental consequences for people like him, Dieter implicitly challenged the legitimacy of its outcome: German reunification. In doing so, he made his personal struggles into a problem for Germans writ large. As he asserted, It all began with the Wende.

      Losers and Winners

      Referring to the Wende in the singular may give the false impression that these very different experiences were all part of one coherent story. Dieter is perhaps a typical example of a so-called Wende-loser: someone who lost out as a result of the Wende. But we could have just as easily begun this book with a story of a Wende-winner: an East German who was able to make the successful transition to capitalist democracy in a reunited Germany. It is hardly surprising, given this diversity of experiences, that there has been little consensus on the meaning of the Wende among Germans.

      The imposition of a global system of capitalism left many East Germans like Dieter without a steady job for the long term (Lepsius 2013). Ironically, it was the pillars of the former GDR—the factory, mine, and farmworkers of the so-called Workers’ and Farmers’ State, as the GDR named itself—who faced the most uncertain and precarious future. Two polls were conducted in fall 2014, excerpts of which were published widely on 1 October 2014 in the German media (e.g., Kleditzsch, 25 Jahre nach …; Berlin Aktuell, Jeder Zweite …). One was by the Allensbach Institute (Wertewandel Ost) and commissioned by the newspapers in Eastern Germany in collaboration with the magazine Super Illu (Burda Newsroom, SuperIllu bringt ...); the other by the television station N24 and Emnid (Presse Portal, N24-Emnid-Umfrage …). According to both polls, most East Germans are still proud of their Eastern heritage, though they do not all identify primarily as East Germans.

      A minority of East Germans, however, still describe themselves as Wende-losers, feeling like second-class citizens. They sometimes express retrospective nostalgia for the East (Ost)—a phenomenon known as Ostalgie—and believe that German reunification cannot be called a success story. To use literary terms, the plots of their Wende stories are tragic (White 1973, 1987): they depict human protagonists overwhelmed by forces beyond their control.

      By contrast, Wende-winners believe that they benefitted more than they were disadvantaged by the Wende. It took some time and effort, but they made the transition by adapting their old practices to new circumstances. The plots of their Wende stories are romantic (White 1973, 1987): they depict human protagonists overcoming sublime challenges in tales that culminate in happy endings.

      Nonetheless, Wende-winners maintain a sense of their difference from Westerners—called the Wall in their heads (Schneider 1982; Straughn 2016). As of 3 October 2014, British historian Frederick Taylor, author of a book about the Berlin Wall (2006), concluded (in a radio interview in 2014) that this Wall is getting smaller—particularly as new generations are born who do not remember divided Germany. But it is still there.

      Histories are both factual accounts and literary narratives. Understood as rhetorical devices, labels like Wende-winners and -losers connect everyday lives to a larger story of Germany and the world, but in the process, they reduce a very wide range of stories to either success or failure. And there are many other ways to use storytelling to shape the interpretation of events. When people write historically, they make interpretive choices to begin and end their tale at particular points in time. They choose which figures to use as their protagonists and which sources best exemplify the past. As we have seen, they embed the wide and often unruly range of human experience into a plot. These ordinary tools of the storyteller all help make the story more compelling (White 1973, 1987; Schütze 1976, 1995; Rosenthal 1995).

      We selected Dieter as the first protagonist for this book in part because his account of the Wende speaks directly to our plot: a story of ruptures in the everyday lives of modern Germans. Still unresolved at the time of the book’s publication, the challenges he faces raise the prospect that these ruptures will remain unresolved for modern Germans as well. His story also allows us to raise scholarly questions about the purpose and impact of writing interpretively about the everyday. We have already raised a first concern: that we misrepresent the facts when we reduce the multiple and oft-contradictory experiences of many people to a discrete event (Vann 1998; Magnússon and Szijártó 2013).

      Consider Dieter. He has found no happy ending to his Wende story. His story is more of an existential tragedy in which the protagonist is fully aware of, but can never escape, the purgatory of his condition. His initial unemployment marked only the first in a series of ongoing personal crises that ended in permanent underemployment, drunkenness, and an array of family problems: And I wasn’t bringing any money home, and no wife could accept that, right? And I had two children, then the divorce came, that came next, then everything took its course, and we were no longer needed. Dieter has been paralyzed by this cumulative mess (Strauss 1985; Riemann and Schütze 1991). Underemployment led to disinterest, self-limitation, resignation, and then despair.

      And then I jumped from the balcony, because—because I could no longer endure it … Fourth floor, see? Then things fell apart afterwards just as before. I was away 14 days … A drainpipe altered my fall [chuckling] and I landed on the grass … Afterwards one can laugh, but—

      Even after his suicide attempt, Dieter’s story took another unexpected pivot: he survived. So now he tells his story like a black comedy, whose protagonists find only a temporary reprieve through ironic engagement with the very gallows that condition their lives.

      Reducing Dieter’s experiences to only one story would miss the whole point (Klein 1995). His life kept turning and pivoting, each time abruptly and in unexpected and profoundly disruptive ways. Even for Dieter, there was no single Wende.

      Our Trajectory

      This book is designed to introduce a generally educated reader to some of the big themes of German studies. The authors of this book want to provide a different point of entry into this interdisciplinary field than the traditional surveys of German culture, economics, politics, and society. Rather than a typical survey of major figures, social groups, broad statistics, geographic regions, or abstract ideas, this book offers views of the everyday lives of modern Germans on the ground. Their stories make for particularly compelling reading because of the repeated tragic and often violent disruptions that they experienced. Indeed, they were so frequent, and so severe, that it makes little sense to treat them as exceptions to the rule. For modern Germans, ruptures were their normal.

      For scholars, this book offers an alternate approach for how one might study everyday life in Germany or elsewhere. Everyday life is fragmented, multivocal, ambiguous, dynamic, and contradictory. It is the locus of complex interactions between elites and masses, micro and macro, public and private, the ordinary and the extraordinary. It contains a confusing mix of structure and agency, myths and experience, propriety and unruliness. These qualities have made it hard to pin down precisely. To make matters worse, this book addresses a particularly messy layer of human experience that resists smooth incorporation into overarching stories: the ruptures of everyday life. Identifying a relatively coherent approach is no small task, as there are many different doorways through which prior scholars have entered into it. Our response to this challenge, outlined here in this first chapter, is to place the paradoxes of the everyday at the core of our approach.

      Gradually over the course of this book, we develop four interrelated concepts for analyzing the everyday. We treat its features as inherently plastic in nature in the sense of being potentially fixed or fluid in any given social situation. They acquire this characteristic, we argue, thanks to the way people interact with one another in everyday life—what we call microsocial interactions—and the way that people lay claim to the right to shape the features of everyday life as they see fit—what we call self-authorizations. Remarkably, people still come to a common, pragmatic, if provisional, kind of consensus about its nature in order to get on with the business of living. How modern Germans chose to do so shaped—for better or for worse—not only their own lives but also the lives of many other people around the world.

      We fully explore these analytic concepts only in the final chapter because we derive our concepts ethnographically from engagement with the evidence. For similar reasons, we will not introduce you here to the various sources and methods of each individual case study, for there are too many different ones. You will find that information too in the chapters to follow. Instead, we use this first chapter to describe the scope of this study in broad theoretical terms: what we mean by ruptures in the everyday and views of modern Germany from the ground. Unconventionally, we engage already in this chapter with empirical evidence to derive our theories and methods. As a result, this introduction is longer than usual and reads a lot like a body chapter. These breaks with academic tradition are all appropriate for a book about rupture.

      The trajectory of this book is not linear. We move abruptly between fragmentary anecdotes of personal experience from everyday life and various kinds of shared, pragmatic understandings about it. Dieter’s struggle to figure out how to frame his experiences illustrates the scope of the challenge: how can he fit his experiences of rupture into a coherent story of his life? and into a collective story of modern Germans? It is hard to make sense of everyday life when it has been so repeatedly and fundamentally disrupted. Yet the authors of this book think that it is worth attempting. Here is how we plan to do so.

      Modern Germans

      The topic of this book, as promised by the title, poses a number of analytic challenges. Take the term modern for instance. Colloquially it refers to the present in contrast to the past, but modern also implies a rejection of the old in favor of the new. The repudiation of traditional or sanctified forms often led to chronic instability and an experience of existential alienation. Moreover, that process of replacing the old with the new never took place evenly, all at once, or without conflict. Indeed, the introduction of the new and the destruction of the old is one major source for the disruptions with which this book is centrally concerned. The modern everyday is thus paradoxically conditioned by its own ruptures.

      As German scholars, we too use modern as an analytic concept to refer to a period of human history generally characterized by instability, alienation, juxtaposition, unevenness, and rupture (Burckhardt 1860; Harootunian 2000; D. Harvey 2003). German accounts of modernity are particularly useful to scholars for two reasons. Those experiences of instability, alienation, juxtaposition, unevenness, and rupture were particularly evident in the German versions of modernity. And in response, German intellectual and popular culture have made precisely those issues into the subject of critical reflection (e.g., Tönnies 1926; Kracauer 1963; Benjamin 2006 also Chakrabarty 2000; Harootunian 2000; Durst 2004).

      Although the scope of the modern is highly debated in the literature, we limit it—solely for the purposes of this book—to the period from 1914 to 2015. We begin our story roughly with the memory of World War I; we pay considerable attention to the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the GDR; and we end with the memory of the Wende in the FRG. Writing in 1994, and therefore ending his periodization in 1989, British historian Eric Hobsbawm referred to this period as the short twentieth century. We end our periodization in the present in terms of the consequences of the Wende, and we include a few outliers from the Second Empire before 1914 and even earlier in Brandenburg-Prussia. These outliers hint at some of the origins of these modern events and remind us that the periodization of modern Germany is fraught with problems.

      Politically, the conflicts of the twentieth century were structured by the three-way struggle between capitalist democracy, communism, and fascism for world dominance. Geopolitically, however, those conflicts centered in part on Germany, owing to unresolved conflicts relating to its boundaries, political system, and disproportionate strength vis-à-vis its European neighbors. One way of posing the so-called German question, at least in the modern era, points to the many different proposals for fitting the different Germanies into a united one that is also located within a larger, peaceful, and stable framework for Europe and the world (Habermas 1997).

      The Great War, World War II, the Cold War, and other conflicts were fought over these and other fundamental issues. One turning point in these stories, for many historians, was the Great War from 1914 to 1918. It began as an internal European civil war but escalated into a global conflict. It saw the collapse of old European empires in East Central Europe and the emergence of fascism and communism as modern political movements. During the mislabeled Interwar Period, these conflicts only shifted strategies and battlefields. In fact, many have continued to the present.

      In this account of modern German history, the apparent defeat of fascism in 1945 marked only the midpoint of seventy-five years of conflict. World War II concluded formally with the so-called Two-Plus-Four Treaty by the Allies and the two German states in 1990. It closely coincided with the crisis of European communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall during the Wende, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet this periodization makes sense only if you accept the story of the Wende as the inevitable, ultimate victory of Western-style capitalist democracy over the forces of totalitarianism at the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). Such a rendering of events is quite misleading. As of 2016, communism is still a powerful force in world politics and fascism is once again a growing threat. More to the point, events like the Wende were never the inevitable product of historical forces but the product of the agency of leaders and citizens alike (Mazower 2000).

      A static and discrete definition of Germany is also an analytic challenge. Germany has always been a compilation of pieces: a multiplicity of political, social, economic, and cultural units on different levels. In the modern period, the region loosely called Germany frequently changed its borders, reflecting the fact that Germany has always been a place in the making. Reunification in 1990 only partially resolved this issue. In post-Wende Germany, we see ongoing tensions, for instance, between former East and West Germans, between natives and immigrants, and between member states of the EU about German dominance. The four maps created for this book, seen below, capture only some of this rich diversity and particularism in the wide range of German places.

      For a study of everyday life, however, national boundaries are only one feature and perhaps not the most salient. Our maps of Germany would be far more splintered and conflicted if we were to include its many other divisions of politics, society, religion, economy, and culture. It makes even less sense to speak of Germans as a whole when we take into consideration the wide range of experiences of everyday life, for instance within particular social milieus. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to leave out the many Germans who lived outside the borders of the German states or inside them but on the peripheries. Particularly during the twentieth century, Germans crossed boundaries in all sorts of complicated ways, resulting in hybrid senses of self, while changing state borders and fluctuating populations similarly complicated the self-image of the people who stayed put.

      We address these issues in two ways. First, we follow modern Germans as they move to, trade with, and conquer other lands and places; as they move within and between various German states and regions; as they construct borders, communities, and worlds; and as they negotiate their sense of self—all transnationally. Second, we devote some attention to places within the nominal boundaries of Germany that are peripheral or outliers in the way we think about modern Germany. In both ways, we define modern Germans not as a fixed identity but a relational one. Accordingly, the four maps we created are not exhaustive; they list only the places that are relevant for the stories we tell in this book. We encourage our readers to refer back to them for reference in this and subsequent chapters.

      During the Cold War, the GDR was just such a periphery. In the East, it marked the furthest extent of the Soviet empire in Europe; in the West, it was viewed pejoratively as the other German state. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MV), the provincial land where Dieter lives, was the periphery of this periphery. Located along the coast of the Baltic Sea, it marks the northern border of German-speaking Central Europe. East Berlin, capital of the GDR, and Berlin, subsequent capital of the reunited FRG, were located just to the south within the Land of Brandenburg. Yet in Berliner dialect, MV is the very definition of janz weit draussen meaning very far away (also abbreviated j.w.d.).

      Map 1.1. Germany Post-1945¹

      Map 1.2. Modern Berlin²

      Map 1.3. Germany in Europe 1648–1945³

      Map 1.4. European Trade Sites in Seventeenth-Century West Africa⁴

      MV is paradoxical in many ways. A largely rural land, it was deeply embedded in industrial production during the GDR only to deindustrialize after the Wende. With the exception of a few cities and tourist centers, commentators have described life there today in depressing terms: empty apartments; poor traffic connections; consolidation and closing of offices, hospitals, post offices, and small businesses; loss of population; declining birthrate; aging population; lower qualification levels; reduced social connections; and a thinning out of social networks. Negative taglines dominate media coverage of these regions, including suffering, desolation, empty highways, depopulated space, pensionopolis, return of the wolves, and call of the barren. As these labels suggest, this German region has been not only physically but also symbolically degraded, to borrow a phrase from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993: 166). MV does not fit comfortably in the success story of reunified Germany.

      But that is precisely why it belongs in a book about ruptures: outliers like this one refuse to sit comfortably with normative assumptions about everyday life. As scholars of the everyday have long argued (Niethammer 1989; Ginzburg and Poni 1991; Medick 1994, 1996; Prakash 2000; Magnússon and Szijártó 2013), the life stories of marginal individuals shed light on the structures and norms of everyday life by their very alterity. The differences in their conditions, attitudes, and action are part and parcel of the juxtapositions, unevenness, alienation, and disruptions of modernity. Outliers are thus not really outside at all.

      One way of summarizing the problem with the category of modern Germans is to note its inherent discontinuities. What it means to be German in the modern period depends on one’s class, ethnicity, gender, generation, race, region, sexuality, state, and so on. Yet these definitions change over time. Considered natural in one situation, they can suddenly be questioned and perhaps reinvented in the next (Scott 1988; Butler 1990; Foucault 1994; Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005).

      The danger of broad generalizations about modern Germany thus lies in their tendency to erase all of this messiness. Thinking about ruptures requires careful attention to contradictions, crises, details, discontinuities, fragments, outliers, and particularities. Hence our preference is to speak of modern Germans. It seems to capture most clearly the cacophony of voices insisting on sharing their own unique stories of everyday life.

      Collapsed Houses

      The Wende began long before 1989, and its impact was still felt long after (Wowtscherk 2014). Illustration 1.1, a photograph of a house in MV taken by one of our authors in 2010, is an example. The worn-out exterior of the house on the right side of the image—draped in sepia, the ubiquitous color of Eastern Europe before the Wende—seems to stand in sharp contrast to the newly painted white exterior of the house in the center—probably repainted after the Wende. This juxtaposition seems to imply that the problems in MV can be traced back to the communist system of the GDR. By contrast, the collapsed roof, the dirt road, the graffiti, and the trash bins all seem to suggest that the social decay is more a matter of the capitalist system of reunified Germany. Taken together, though, they suggest longer-term processes of change in everyday life that transcend the political divisions of East and West.

      When struggling to comprehend how these changes took place, scholars tend to organize their thinking in terms of either structures or agency. Agency refers to the actions of intentional individuals, which then shape the conditions of the possible for other people. Structures refer to the patterns of power, markets, relationships, and meanings that also both constrain and enable that action. It has been quite some time since scholars called for poststructuralist approaches that move beyond this rather unhelpful distinction (e.g., Bourdieu 1974; Lloyd 1991; Sewell 2005). Understanding everyday life requires this kind of synthetic approach. Dieter’s experiences in MV can once again help us to illustrate ours.

      Illustration 1.1. Collapsing House, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2010. Photo: T. Gurr.

      MV is not urban, but it is also not strictly rural. During the GDR, many agricultural workers there were employed in various forms of collaborative and cooperative farms. They were not farmers in the traditional sense but trained workers specializing in particular tasks within or in support of these agricultural enterprises. These enterprises structured everyday life, providing early childhood education, sporting facilities, cafeterias, and sometimes also local public transportation. The long-term structural decline of agriculture was therefore more sudden and shocking in the East. Whereas only 3 percent of all workers in the FRG were employed in the agricultural sector at the time of the Wende, it had been 10 percent in the GDR (Lutz and Grünert 1996: 101–20).

      The Wende almost completely destroyed those structures. Within two years of the fall of the Wall, the number of people employed in agriculture shrank from around 850,000 to 250,000, which included 150,000 in short-term or part-time jobs (Meyer and Uttitz 1993: 221–47). When local agricultural production cooperatives in MV failed, so too did the sociability that was based on the services they provided. An equally dramatic set of structural adjustments took place in the industrial branches, which is where Dieter had been working. Seventy percent of the people employed in industry lost their jobs as a result of reunification. To be sure, some industrial concerns, like the shipyards of MV, were kept alive through privatization but only through massive reductions in employees. Their former workers lived in a continual state of crisis characterized by high unemployment, declining work skills, and dependence on welfare (Hauss, Land, and Willisch 2006: 34; also Merkl 2012).

      Drawing attention to these structures is essential for understanding everyday life. In both sectors, it was the working classes rather than the white-collar workers who were let go and who then lacked other viable alternatives for employment. Both also lost the high status that they had enjoyed as workers and farmers in the Workers’ and Farmers’ State. Although they both lived in rural settings, neither could turn back to traditional agricultural practices or ways of life to substitute for this collapse, as those traditions had long disappeared. To be sure, similar processes of deindustrialization and privatization have taken place in many other regions around the modern world; the situation in the GDR differed in that its citizens faced both at the same time and in both industry and agriculture.

      The GDR was partially to blame: they failed to reinvest sufficiently in industry in the years before the Wende. Yet the reunited German government proved similarly unwilling to commit resources necessary to modernize these concerns thereafter. Unable to compete globally, the only other choice seemed to be liquidation and closure. The celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of reunification praised the successful transition of a few of these firms but with only a fraction of the original employees; and the stories of those who lost out from these structural changes entered into the media stories mostly in terms of Ostalgie.

      The benefit of a structural analysis is that it can demonstrate the impact of changing conditions on the people experiencing them. The people interviewed for this study had all completed their training as skilled workers in the former GDR, but despite the high value placed on such training, they were all dismissed from work after 1989. The thing that most disappointed them about the Wende was their feeling of being dispensable. They were industrial workers in deindustrialized and postindustrial areas. They quickly lost the sense of belonging—not just to the GDR but also to Germany, the working classes, their village, their families. They became outcasts. German scholars called them decoupled, surplus, superfluous. These labels tell stories (Klein 1995: 292).

      Dieter’s long-term unemployment is certainly evidence of a larger structural problem in the economy. Yet the fact that Dieter framed his personal struggles in terms of the Wende illustrates a more

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